The Stadia port of Terraria was canceled suddenly earlier this month after a developer’s Google account was abruptly locked. But after working with Google, the team behind the indie hit has announced a happy ending: Terraria is coming to Stadia.
Earlier this month, Terraria dev Andrew Spinks was locked out of his Google account, making it impossible for him to access his Gmail inbox among other important Google services and sites. After weeks of trying to get his account back, no progress had been made. On February 7, Spinks tweeted his frustration with the company and the situation. He also stated that the (then unannounced) Stadia port wasn’t going to happen.
But now, Spinks and Terraria development studio Re-Logic have reversed course. As spotted by Eurogamer, the news comes via a post on the Terraria forums. According to Re-Logic, Google explained the situation to them and restored access to all accounts.
“After a month of pushing (and with the immense support of our fans), Google finally reached out and was able to provide a lot of transparency around the situation and to restore access to all of our accounts. Due to the hard work the Stadia team has put in - as well as our partners at 505 Games - we have decided that we will allow the upcoming launch Terraria on Google Stadia to proceed. The Terraria Stadia build is based on the DR Studios 1.4.0.5 (latest) build, and is currently at Google for certification review.”
Released back in 2011, Terraria has continued to receive frequent updates, new content and has been ported to nearly every platform under the sun. After selling 30 million copies across multiple consoles and devices, Stadia was one of the last places where you couldn’t play Terraria.
While this story has a happy ending, things over at Google Stadia seem to be going poorly. On February 1, the company canceled all of its own Stadia projects, closing both of its new game studios and laying off nearly 150 developers in the process, according to a source familiar with Stadia’s operations. All of this came with no warning and only a week after devs had received emails from Stadia VP Phil Harrison congratulating them on their “great progress.” This led to an awkward situation where a game was unable to be patched to fix annoying bugs because Google had uh... fired all the developers.
Google is also facing a class-action lawsuit over a lack of true 4k. And yesterday, it was reported that after spending millions of dollars securing big-name games, like Red Dead Redemption 2, Stadia underperformed its sales target by hundreds of thousands of users.
So good news: Terraria is coming to Google Stadia at some point. Bad news: It’s completely possible Stadia won’t even be around before it finally releases on Google’s failing streaming platform.